The French study Cadre de vie et sécurité ¹⁾ has included a questionnaire module about transport to facilitate an analysis of the locomotion habits of those interviewed and how safe they feel on collective public transport.²⁾

The questionnaire includes the following question: Do you feel safe when using collective public transport? And offers five reply options: “always”, “most of the time”, “sometimes”, “never” and “don’t know”.

First conclusions

The five-year objective of the study involved interviewing 82,209 people, of which 52,204 were users of collective public transport. Over 50% of users feel safe when using collective public transport, 29% feel safe most of the time and 16.3% rarely feel safe.³⁾

In accordance with sex, of the 52,204 users of public transport, 21,764 were men (46.4%) and 30,440 were women (53.6%). Concerning feelings of safety in terms of gender when using public transport, a bigger proportion of men feel safe, whereas a larger proportion of women feel safe most of the time or only sometimes.

In terms of age range, the feeling of safety on collective public transport was higher according to age, such as those from 46 to 65 and over 66.

Concerning the frequency of use of collective public transport, 21.6% were daily users, 11.1% used it two or three times a week, 13.3% two or three times a month and 53.9% less often or did not reply. Whatever the frequency of use of collective public transport, at least 100 % of users always felt safe, and those who felt safe most of the time amounted to around or over 30%, and those who rarely felt safe amounted to roughly 15%. Therefore, there seems to be no correlation between the user’s feeling of safety and how often he / she uses collective transport.

Data and analysis of the feeling of safety on collective public transport is available on the website of the Institut national des hautes études de la sécurité et de la justice (INHESJ)